Alpaca Shearing

Island Alpaca’s next baby alpaca shearing is scheduled for July 28, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

at the farm at Head of the Pond Road near the blinker in Oak Bluffs.

This is an opportunity for all the family to experience the fleece-to-fiber transition first-hand. All are welcome to observe the expert shearers as they work their clippers through the alpacas’ fleece without any harm to the animal.

On Sunday, July 24 the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr. will be the guest preacher at the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs. Reverend Forbes is Senior Minister Emeritus of the Riverside Church and is founder and president of the Healing of the Nations Foundation. In national and international religious circles, Reverend Forbes is known as the preacher’s preacher because of his extensive preaching career and his charismatic style.

Sheriff’s Meadow Sanctuary, the Edgartown property that gives its name to the Island’s largest private landowner and conservation group, is slated for restoration.

Adam Moore, executive director of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, said at the foundation’s annual dinner this week that more than $300,000 of the $500,000 needed to refurbish and maintain the 20-acre property for public use has already been raised, and the foundation is actively seeking the balance from friends and neighbors.

The Martha’s Vineyard Little League summer travel baseball program is in full swing and All-Star teams at five different levels (ages 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 years old) have been participating in tournament play.

Stand here and there, old Vineyard homes,

All wrapped in deep content.

— Emma Mayhew Whiting

They’re painting all the houses white in Edgartown,

capping flat pickets to fences around resplendent lawns,

cut on a diagonal. The parade is just around the corner.

Sit at the spinning wheel in the keeping room, scrimshaw

on the mantel. The crane swings in the high fireplace

and the streets are filled with shouts for

Some years back, my wife and I rented a tiny little cottage in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. It was called the Binnacle. According to a story we heard, the Binnacle had been built with a keel for a foundation and a hurricane had floated it to where it was now, on the road from Lobsterville toward Red Beach.

Instead of moving it back to its original site, the Binnacle’s owner, Dorothy Scoville, had simply bought the lot where it had landed.

Ometepe is as unlikely a place as you could ever imagine to catch a glimpse of the future. Although unique in the world, an island composed of two volcanoes in the midst of Nicaragua’s freshwater Lake Cocibolca, it is mostly a quiet backwater, both off the grid and the beaten path as well.

Vineyard residents have a unique op portunity next Thursday, July 28, to assess the state of civil liberties and justice in America as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Two remarkable speakers — retiring federal judge Nancy Gertner, and national ACLU legal director Steve Shapiro — will discuss The Pursuit of Justice: Perspectives on Major Civil Liberties Issues from Two Sides of the Bench, as part of the ACLU of Massachusetts Roger Baldwin Summer Series at the Chilmark Community Center at 7 p.m.

Murky Waters

It’s been a delicious hot spell, the days sunny but not excessively so and the nights cool. Perfect Island weather. Perfect for summer. Perfect for swimming.

The Tisbury Firefighters Association invites everyone to its annual Car Show, open this Saturday, July 23, from 4 to 8 p.m. at the RM Packer lot and docks on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven.

The show includes more than 50 cars — from classic, custom, antiques and hot rods — and this year includes custom motorcycles. Most of the cars are Island-owned and operated.